Give teachers a physics test from a woman and they’ll give her worse grades

When the same answer is provided with a male or female bio, grades are different.

We reported yesterday on the workplace difficulties that many female scientists face as they advance through their careers. But all of those problems happen after the women have been through years of education, a process that can also be a source of challenges. A variety of surveys have found indications that stereotypes about women's capabilities in science and math influence expectations throughout their education.

Connecting these biases to actual educational problems can be challenging, but a Swiss researcher named Sarah Hofer has found a way to test these issues. Hofer provided a large panel of physics teachers with a single answer that was attached to either male or female biographical information and asked them to grade it. She found that tests with a female bio got significantly lower grades, at least from teachers who were early in their careers.

Hofer's approach was simple. She told physics teachers in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany that she was doing a survey on their grading practices. They'd be given a physics question with an answer that required detailed reasoning in Newtonian mechanics, along with some information about a student and the student's answer.

The answer was designed to have some correct aspects and a few errors, giving the teachers some leeway in grading. The student, however was completely fictitious. Instead, the teachers were given the same bio but with pronouns changed to indicate that the student was either male or female.

Over 750 teachers graded the answer, and the results showed a clear pattern: despite the answers being identical, attaching a female bio to them resulted in lower grades. The problem was worse in inexperienced teachers. "The gender effect that was reflected in an advantage of approximately 0.77 standard deviations on the grade scale for the fictive boy thus represented teachers’ gender bias at the beginning of their career," Hofer writes.

But things shift as teachers get more experience. The grades for females gradually go up, while those of males decline, and the gap is largely eliminated after teachers have a decade of experience. There was one exception to this rule: male German teachers. For some reason, their grading showed no gender bias regardless of teaching experience. (Instead, they graded everyone more harshly as they taught longer.)

What could explain this pattern? Backed by numerous citations, Hofer argues that it mostly involves the mental shortcuts we all take to avoid spending too much time and energy reasoning things out. When dealing with people, these shortcuts can lead us to rely on stereotypes. In this case, inexperienced teachers haven't developed the skills needed to quickly evaluate a student's performance, so they fall back on our cultural biases, which is that females are less likely to do well in physics.

Hofer admits that her study has a big weakness: it's possible that given an entire test, some of the teachers may have built a more complete picture of the student's physics abilities and graded accordingly. But Hofer's data does indicate that female students in Switzerland often end up with lower grades than male students.

She also offers blinded grading as a solution. Tests can be tagged with a one-time ID, and the teacher would grade them without knowing which student they were from. Having the tests entered on a computer would make it easier to tag them and ensure that students' handwriting didn't subvert their test's anonymity.